


damaged goods

by MourningPluto



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Sex Mentions, Sexual Content, filthy relationships, icky feelings, murky emotional waters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 12:29:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MourningPluto/pseuds/MourningPluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since you moved in with Cronus's dad and him, everything's been so fucked up and strange.</p><p>The fact that the two of you regularly have sex probably doesn't do a lot to help those feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	damaged goods

While you wait for the sight of his midnight black Volvo – the one he bitched about for months after, to your recollection, on account of how he’d begged his father/your stepfather for a Camaro or a BMW or even a Corvette – you realize, vaguely, that it has started to rain.

+++

You’re always really quick to correct – _step_ brothers, you insist, and the _step_ is just as important as the last step on the staircase, the one that you sometimes forget and you feel like you’re falling. It makes your stomach lurch; it makes you panic, irrationally, for a second or two.

Yes, that’s Cronus. He’s the last step on the staircase; trips you up every time. 

Most people assume (you can tell from looking) that you’re quick to correct them out of disdain, and you could hardly blame them, because that’s pretty much what your tone conveys. _No, no – I’m not related to this guy. Stepbrother._ And you guess that’s part of it. But it isn’t all of it either. 

It just happens too much. You’re a junior, he’s a senior. You’re the one who had to leave your safe little conservatory in New York to move all the way out to fresh Buttfuck, Nowhere; a heinous little town called Lyndon, smack dab in the middle of the Midwest. You’re the new kid. And he, apparently, is somebody important, so when word gets out that you’re living with him and his father, they have to ask you if you’re his brother. You used to be polite in saying no, but you got tired of that and so now even though you’re saying the same words, you may as well be telling them to fuck right off. 

Part of it is also because Cronus is, incredibly, popular here. He sure wouldn’t have been back home. For one thing, he looks like he tumbled out of an old comic book or possibly a-ha’s Take On Me music video, that’s how fucking antiquated he is with his jeans that are rolled up to show his socks and his stupid greased up hair. He also wears his letterman jacket – apparently that’s not something to be mocked here? Back where you're from, only the douchebag kids wore their lettermans. Although that isn’t to imply Cronus isn’t a douchebag, because he pretty much certainly is, but still. Does no one else see it? 

Here’s the thing. They do. 

And also, not. 

You found out pretty early on that he’s one of those popular kids no one can stand, the kind with no real friends because through some kind of societal circle-jerk he is simultaneously well-liked and universally loathed, a concept you were sure only existed on awful television shows about life as a high school youth. Although you don’t know for sure, apparently he’s, like, always trying to get laid, and apparently also it never works. (That is according to Vriska, your new semi-friend who seems so vitriolic and nasty that you think she too could have been birthed from the bowels of New York.) And although you don’t say so, you know she’s wrong. His attempts at getting a piece of easy ass fail _almost_ always. 

In short, the reason you know it's _almost_ always is the third reason you emphasize that yes, he’s your stepbrother. It’d be a lot weirder that he talked you into sucking his dick if you were real brothers, but you aren’t, so that makes it okay. 

This reason is probably the most pertinent, but the other two are just as valid. 

+++

Cronus has to pick you up from school every day because you don’t know how to dive and you have play rehearsals from 3:30 to 6:00. Right now you’re in a play called Les Liaisons Dangereuses. You play a servant. But considering you’re a new kid, you guess that’s sort of good. You had been about to go over your lines, when it started raining – black, freezing rain that makes your clothes stick to you. Although you’re wearing a Depeche Mode T-Shirt and a neutral black hoodie, although you’re wearing dark denim jeans, although you’re wearing clothes that for Lyndon's neutral climate ought to keep you quite warm, the rain only serves to make you start shaking. Your teeth chatter. Your hair falls in front of your face. Your glasses don’t actually help you see anything anymore (raindrops litter their lenses) and so you take them off, defeated, to slip them in your jacket’s pocket. 

Although you’re sure he’d rather be doing something else, Cronus has to pick you up from school every day. So where the hell is he? 

+++

He’d made several passes at you before. See, this is how you justify it.

As far as you know he makes passes at everyone, but you hadn’t known that at the time. How could you? Still bitter at having to leave Feferi and Kanaya and Karkat and all your other cool friends back home, you were blind to just about everything, and in fact it took you a little while to realize that he wasn’t making some kind of joke. (Or fine, maybe it was a joke all along, but it was a joke that ultimately ended up with you half naked on his bed, in his room that was bigger than your entire apartment back home, with the sheets scratching your thighs as he assured you on repeat that it sure was a good thing he was there to fulfill your weird kinky little fantasies, because honestly, who else would?) 

That first time was on a school night, but since neither of you had school, you went ahead and groped each other until 3:00 in the morning. You must have fallen asleep after the fact; you woke up a few hours in your own bed, rather ashamed to find that you missed his presence. Maybe you were just vulnerable. Sure, okay. 

Naturally neither of you ever brought it up. You never do. The thing about you and Cronus is that every time you fuck it’s going to be the last. Every time you screw around it never actually happened. Secrets and sex go together hand in hand, as far as you’re concerned, and so you just avoid looking at him directly as you pour your orange juice and try not to think about it a whole lot. 

+++

You have to skip past his shitty music a lot on your iPod, as you sit on the pavement with your backpack between your knees, using your left arm to shield your screen from raindrops while your right hand holds it and scrolls past songs that remind you too much of him. 

Some of it really is his music – for instance, Yankee Bayonet and The Mariner’s Revenge and Rake’s Song – which is fair enough, but some of it is music you still have to skip even though you bought it yourself at one point or another. He’s stolen it somehow, which infuriates you; and yet, at the same time, you still can’t listen to Dream Police or Somebody Told Me because they both remind you of your hands in his hair and the way his mouth tastes after breaking into his dad’s liquor cabinet and the way he probably keeps that old-as-fuck mattress on purpose just because of the way it squeaks so pornographically. 

They’re nice enough songs, true. But they take you somewhere else. 

You settle for I Wanna Be Sedated. Mostly because you do. 

+++

The thing to remember is that no matter what – whether it strikes you as fucked up, whether it hurts, whether it’s lovely, whether you cry, whatever – is that it was your idea. 

Of course, many times it’s not. You don’t often have the fucking gumption to stroll up to Cronus when he’s sitting on his chair with a guitar in his hands – the beautiful bastard – working on a song about the finer details of his existential angst and demand he give you a pity screw. He probably wouldn’t turn you down, but he’d also get a kick out of being asked. So you’ll never do that, no. That’s why it isn’t always your idea. 

God, though, sometimes Cronus has you fooled. 

Even if you didn’t actually proposition him (which is almost always) it may as well have been your idea, because isn’t it true that you’ve been stressed out? Isn’t it true that Lyndon doesn’t have a kickboxing instructor or a Starbucks or any of your other former fixes, and as everyone knows you can only leave pink little half moons in your arms with your fingernails so many times before it starts to become a bad habit. In other words, none of your other fixes are applicable. How the hell’s an angry, bitter little shit like you supposed to alleviate yourself of all that fucking tension? 

(You are paraphrasing. You’re pretty sure Cronus doesn’t use words like ‘alleviate’, although then again, he did get an 1860 on the SAT. First try; no studying. You got a 1790 after taking a prep class and everything and you found out the same day as him. You were so angry you spit in his face while he was fucking you into his mattress.) 

Yeah, he does have a point. 

Sometimes it bothers you the way he rationalizes it, like he’s doing you such a favor by deigning to see you naked, like he’d have anyone else to do anything with if you didn’t exist. He plays the martyr, and he’s so damn good at it that you suspect one of these days he’ll finish on your face and give you a speech about how he was doing it as a favor to you personally. Cronus is all about favors. You hate him. You’ve told him so. 

You’ve told him the other thing (the opposite) too. But that’s even more taboo than the fact that you have sex. His silence spoke volumes and in a fit of rage you cut off the strings and never looked back. 

+++ 

You should really stop digging your nails into your arm so much. But you’re so numb from how cold it is that you don’t feel a thing. 

+++

Occasionally he’s capable of kindness. You both are, really.

For example, one time someone scrawled the word ‘faggot’ on your locker in Sharpie, which struck you as rather absurd because who would actually do such a thing? Isn’t this the kind of shit you read about in books or see on TV? Who the hell has enough time to actually execute such an endeavor? For that matter, who would even know? 

In a fit of fear that one of you might have broken your unspoken rule, you ended up confessing not-at-all-casually. You remember sitting on your bed, Cronus leaning against your dresser, and you remember that although you’d started off laughing (how could they even know, it ain’t like I go around suckin’ dick at school) at some point you realized you were crying actual tears in front of him. You expected him to look at you with disgust, but that’s not what happened. 

The next day you found out that he apparently was popular – he must have been, to be able to recognize the handwriting and figure out who did it. Of course, you wouldn’t have known about his surreptitious detective work if word hadn’t spread like wildfire that he beat the everloving shit out of the kid who did it. 

One broken nose, two fractured ribs, and a big fuckin’ shiner. 

It became something else the two of you never talked about, although you broke your usual rule by hugging him that day after school. 

“I can’t believe I got suspended,” he said. 

“Yes, you can.” 

“Yeah. He deserved it, though.” And that, really, was it. 

+++

You see his car in the distance, and your breath hitches. He honks his horn a couple of times and you shoot him the bird, shouting at him to _fuck off right to hell_ although you know you can’t hear him. You put your iPod away into a pocket of your backpack and sling it over your shoulder. 

You open the door to the passenger’s seat when he pulls up. Normally he makes a joke about you ought to take the backseat, about how you haven’t really earned shotgun, but he must have taken a look at you and seen you were in no way in the fucking mood. You take off your backpack and toss it on the floor before closing the door and closing yourself in. 

You relax a little bit. His car is warm and dry. 

“How was work, champ?” He calls you that because it pisses you off, and calls it ‘work’ because, as he puts it, ‘that director treats you like her bitch anyway so you may as well be getting paid for what it’s worth’. You look at him and only retain the drive to shrug your shoulders a little bit. 

“Hey, Cro. It was fine. Boring.” You don't elaborate. You're cold and damp and in no mood to be charismatic. 

He seems to consider this as he drives away, and you sit and stare at the windshield wipers out of lack for anything else to do. When you aren’t having sex, the two of you don’t really talk all that much. 

Finally you guess the silence must be killing him – he speaks. 

“That’s too bad.”

You turn your head to look at him, perhaps with mild suspicion. It’s an oddly self-aware comment, really; somewhat concerned, but spoken with little conviction. A country song starts playing, softly; he turns it to a song you recognize to be Paradise By the Dashboard Lights. 

Still, his comment is – at least, for Cronus – vaguely sentimental. You even deign to give him a smile. 

“Yeah, it sure sucks to be me.” 

His interest (feigned or not) in your affairs is almost enough to warm your heart. But you’re so numb from how cold it is that you don’t feel a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> This is fucked up it fucked me up 
> 
> Had some of these thoughts floating in my mind for a while. Not sure what I was going for, but meh.


End file.
